Music in Bass Hall: Jeff Davis: Early American Music

Jeff Davis helps celebrate Peterborough’s 275th anniversary with a program focusing on early American music.

Jeff is one of America’s most respected collectors and interpreters of traditional music. He has traveled far to visit “source singers”–farmers and miners who remembered the old songs and tunes–and closer at hand to libraries and archives, always look for the best of the music that was once common in out towns and villages.

An event with Jeff might include New England ballads sea songs, African-American banjo tunes, cowboy ditties, rare Yankee fiddle tunes and more. You will “meet” singers and players from the North Carolina mountains and coast, Nova Scotia farmers, African-American sailors, New York loggers and many others.

Jeff plays fiddle, banjo, mandocello, guitar, spoons, jaw’s harps and a few instruments hand-made by folk craftsmen. He has toured extensively throughout the United States and to festivals in Canada, England, Ireland, The Netherlands, and Norway. He recently released a solo album, Some Fabulous Yonder. He also worked on an English Anthology, called Song Links, of old English songs and their American variants. His latest CDs are a collection of thirteen Civil War Naval Songs with an all-star crew of singers and musicians including Dan Milner and David Coffin; and Sharp’s Appalachian Harvest with Brian Peters.